Evander Holyfield

By JOE DRAPE

Published: March 3, 2013

‘I Can’t Be No. 2’

He was among the gentlest souls I’ve ever come across — soft-spoken, thoughtful, self-aware. When you saw Evander Holyfield in a suit at the airport waiting with 2 of his 11 kids, you thought financier, salesman or even preacher, but never undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

He was small, under 200 pounds, chiseled like a garden sculpture, gnarly and wrought together with steel. People rarely called him “Champ” — just Evander or Holy. At one time or another, he wore almost every belt in the cruiser, light and heavyweight divisions. He had no entourage or carnival barkers trailing in his wake, telling him how great he was.

“He’s never needed them,” his longtime trainer Don Turner once told me. “There’s something about Evander that says you don’t need to treat him like he’s special. And nobody does.”

Before his second bout with Mike Tyson, Holyfield trained in a tin shed gym beneath a highway in a warehouse district in downtown Houston. Seven months earlier, he had shocked the world with an 11th-round technical knockout of Tyson, who was on the comeback trail after serving a prison sentence for rape and was thought to have returned to the fearsome form he had shown as a young fighter.

Holyfield, then 34, was supposed to be washed up, raking in his last big paychecks. Instead, he became only the second person to win a heavyweight championship for a third time.

Holyfield, who was getting $35 million for the rematch, started each workout at dawn beneath a naked light bulb in a prayer circle. Jennie Fairfield, a 50-year-old legal assistant, was there. So was Richard Waters, a computer analyst. There were others — regular folks who showed up each morning. He asked them what was going on in their lives as they stretched or performed calisthenics. He knew why they came.

“I’ve never been good instantly at anything,” he said, shrugging. “I have to work and work to catch up. It’s something everyone can understand.”

Then the gospel music would start pumping through a boom box, and Turner would remind Holyfield that “you can’t take a bow today for the performance you gave yesterday.”

It was clear as soon as the rematch started that Holyfield had broken Tyson in the previous fight. Twice Tyson bit Holyfield’s ears, taking a big enough chunk out of the right one that it was found on the mat. Tyson was disqualified and a near riot broke out.

In Houston, Holyfield said he was expecting a war. He was confident that he would be fine as long as he maintained his peace. He had.

“I don’t ever measure myself by somebody else’s strength,” he said. “I’ll be better. He can’t force his will on me, because I won’t let him. If I did something else for 26 years, I’d be great at it. It’s the way I am. I can’t be No. 2.”